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Just when "fake news" is faking everybody out everywhere you look at American media,
here comes the new upgrade.

Artificial intelligence is fueling the next phase of misinformation.
The new type of synthetic media known as deepfakes poses major challenges for newsrooms when it comes to verification.
This content is indeed difficult to track: Can you tell which of the images below is a fake?

(Check the bottom of this story for the answer.) I'm adding that it really doesn't matter.

We at The Wall Street Journal are taking this threat seriously and have launched an internal deepfakes task force,
led by the Ethics & Standards and the Research & Development teams. This group, the WSJ Media Forensics Committee,
is comprised of video, photo, visuals, research, platform, and news editors who have been trained in deepfake detection.
Beyond this core effort, we’re hosting training seminars with reporters, developing newsroom guides,
and collaborating with academic institutions such as Cornell Tech to identify ways technology can be used to combat this problem.

“Raising awareness in the newsroom about the latest technology is critical,” said Christine Glancey,
a deputy editor on the Ethics & Standards team who spearheaded the forensics committee.
“We don’t know where future deepfakes might surface so we want all eyes watching out for disinformation.”

John Watt here: Fortunately, no onstage holograms of dead politicians have made any public speeches.

I used to think Michael Jordan was the master of deep fakes, but now I'm not sure.
Were some of those slam-dunks photo-shopped?
Did "Blew Bayou" really run faster on wet tracks?
Was that really a right-handed Stratocaster with the strings strung upside-down,
or did Jimi play left-handed strings on an upside-down right-handed guitar?
Why did I play with a left-handed body with a right-handed neck?
Did I deepfake myself out?
Fretting fingers want to know.

There is only one story in California, and that is the fires. What are we going to do about the fires?
On Friday evening, after a week spent indoors trying to avoid breathing the filthy air outside my windows,
my family and I jumped in the car and drove from San Francisco to Lake Tahoe.
It was one of the only spots on PurpleAir’s map of the state that wasn’t covered in the orange,
red, or purple dots that indicate smoke-filled air. While smoke from fires has drifted into San Francisco before —
most notably last October when multiple fires lashed across the wine country —
in the 20 years I’ve lived here it’s never stuck around like this.
I’ve never seen so many people in masks or seen the sky stay so dark for so many days on end.
As California’s fires go, this was something new.

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2018 is the year when everyone, everyone, in the state ran from the fires or choked on the fumes.
It is a before-and-after moment.
In California, in mid-November of 2018, it became as clear as it did in New York in mid-September of 2001,
that what was a once-distant threat has now arrived.

The two major fires (and there are others) that have run through California in recent weeks were unique.
Scores of people are dead. Almost a thousand are still missing.
Tens of thousands of homes were destroyed in fires that have chewed through nearly 250,000 acres.
Meanwhile, millions of people are stuck under a blanket of toxic smoke.
These fires were equal-opportunity destroyers that ravaged cities as far apart and different as the Northern California hill town outpost of Paradise,
and Southern California’s wealthy beachside enclave of Malibu. The fire crossed class divides while highlighting them too —
even as thousands were made homeless, a wealthy few were able to enlist private firefighters to protect their property.

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Many factors made the situation what it is — a sprawl of homes slung into the wilderness, for example, and fire management practices.
But the most salient cause is climate change. We are a state of dead trees and drought, forests full of upright tinder ,
where bark beetles chew through perished crimson-colored forests that should be all evergreen boughs.
We have built our homes in canyons and on hillsides that resemble chimneys. And now it doesn’t seem like there’s any way out.

It feels like a ratcheting up of calamitous forces already well underway.
Yes, the Camp fire is the most destructive in California’s history. But the largest fire in California’s history,
the Mendocino Complex fire, was also in 2018. The second-largest fire? It was in 2017. The second most destructive?
Also in 2017. And the fires now burn nearly all year round; there is no more “fire season.”

John Watt here: After the flooding of New Orleans I was talking with the Mayor of Thorold, Ontario.
She said their flood insurance, to cover storage basements, was $30,000 a year, now building a new City Hall.
After New Orleans the Province of Ontario, those Toronto politicians, forced them to pay $300,000 for a new policy,
seen as subsidizing American insurance companies.

For Louisiana farmer Richard Fontenot and his neighbors, the solution was a costly one: Let the crops rot.

Fontenot plowed under 1,000 of his 1,700 soybean acres this fall, chopping plants into the dirt instead of harvesting more than $300,000 worth of beans.
His beans were damaged by bad weather, made worse by a wet harvest. Normally, he could sell them anyway to a local elevator - giant silos usually run by international grains merchants that store grain.
But this year they aren’t buying as much damaged grain. The elevators are already chock full.
“No one wants them,” Fontenot said in a telephone interview. As he spoke, he drove his tractor across a soybean field, tilling under his crop. “I don’t know what else to do.”
Across the United States, grain farmers are plowing under crops, leaving them to rot or piling them on the ground, in hopes of better prices next year, according to interviews with more than two dozen farmers, academic researchers and farm lenders. It’s one of the results, they say, of a U.S. trade war with China that has sharply hurt export demand and swamped storage facilities with excess grain.
In Louisiana, up to 15 percent of the oilseed crop is being plowed under or is too damaged to market, according to data analyzed by Louisiana State University staff. Crops are going to waste in parts of Mississippi and Arkansas. Grain piles, dusted by snow, sit on the ground in North and South Dakota. And in Illinois and Indiana, some farmers are struggling to protect silo bags stuffed with crops from animals.
FILE PHOTO: Eric Honselman opens a shed which holds 75,000 bushels of corn he was forced to store after his regular bins were filled to capacity with corn and soybeans on the family farm in Casey, Illinois, U.S., October 25, 2018. REUTERS/Mark Weinraub

U.S. farmers planted 89.1 million acres of soybeans this year, the second most ever, expecting China’s rising demand to give them better returns than other bulk crops.
But Beijing slapped a 25 percent tariff on U.S. soybeans in retaliation for duties imposed by Washington on Chinese exports. That effectively shut down U.S. soybean exports to China, worth around $12 billion last year. China typically takes around 60 percent of U.S. supplies.
The U.S. government rolled out an aid program of around the same size - $12 billion - to help farmers absorb the cost of the trade war. As of mid-November, $837.8 million had been paid out.
Some of that money will pass from farmers to grain merchants such as Archer Daniels Midland Co (ADM.N) and Bunge Ltd (BG.N), who are charging farmers more to store crops at elevators where there is limited space. Bunge and ADM did not respond to requests for comment on storage fees.
The storage crunch and higher fees have boosted revenues at grain elevator Andersons [ANDE.O], Chief Executive Officer Pat Bowe said in an interview.
“It’s paying a grain handler to store - it’s the old-fashioned way to make money,” Bowe said.
These are also boom times for John Wierenga, president of grain storage bag retailer Neeralta. Sales of their bags - white tubes up to 300 feet now littering Midwest fields - are up 30 percent from a year ago.
“The demand has been huge,” Wierenga said. “We are sold out.” HIGHER FEES

Farmers are feeling the pinch. Those in central Illinois could pay up to 40 percent more than in previous years to store crops over the coming weeks, agricultural consultant Matt Bennett estimated.
FILE PHOTO: 75,000 bushels of corn is stored in a shed after the regular bins have been filled to capacity with corn and soybeans on the family farm of Eric Honselman in Casey, Illinois, U.S., October 25, 2018. REUTERS/Mark Weinraub

That amounts to between 3 cents to 6 cents a bushel, Bennett said, a painful expense for a crop that was already expected to deliver little income to farmers.
Storage rates are swinging wildly, depending on the elevator location. Grain dealers at rivers typically charge more than their inland counterparts because they are more dependent on export markets.
At some Midwest river terminals, farmers were paying 60 cents a bushel to store soybeans until the end of the year - more than twice as much as a year ago. Some commercial terminals are charging farmers to just drop off their soybeans.
The trade war has only exacerbated the strain on storage, which has been a persistent problem in recent years due largely to a worldwide oversupply of grains.
Even before this fall’s harvest, around 20 percent of total grain storage available in the U.S. was full with corn, soybeans and wheat from previous harvests, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That was the highest in 12 years for this time of year.
Tesla cuts China car prices amid trade war

Some grain merchants are also charging additional fees for farmers who deliver less-than-perfect soybeans, said Russell Altom, a soybean farmer and senior vice president of agricultural lending at Relyance Bank in Pine Bluff, Arkansas.
“I’ve never seen things this bad,” Altom said. “I know several farmers who hired lawyers, to see if they can sue over the pricing and fees issues.”
Eric Maupin, a farmer in Newbern, Tennessee, said he was facing so-called dockage rates of between 60 cents at $1.20 per bushels at Bunge Elevators in his area - more than three times as high as a year ago.
“Damage can be anything - a split bean, one that’s too small, one that’s too big - whatever,” Maupin said.
Some farmers are pulling farm equipment out of barns to make room for the overflow of grains.
After packing nearly half a million bushels of corn and soybeans in their usual steel bins, Terry Honselman and his family found some additional space in 35-year-old shed on their Casey, Illinois, farm.
Most years, the building protects farm equipment and bags of seed. Now, it is stuffed with 75,000 bushels of corn.
Like others, Honselman is banking on a resolution to the trade war before this spring - when he says he will need the space back for his planting supplies.
Reporting by Mark Weinraub in Chicago and Casey, Illinois; and P.J. Huffstutter in Chicago; Editing by Caroline Stauffer, Simon Webb and Paul Thomasch

For me, the reports of laser and satellite microwave technology being used to start California wildfires is new.
I looked through almost twenty YouTube videos to see what was being said and by who, and for the best visuals too.
I'm sure you know when you look at a YouTube video it prompts the display of similar videos. I'm depending on that.
This video is short and shows convincing photos with a realistic narrative, which is why I'm using it here.
Other videos offer scientific explanations, describe existing military use, and offer motives for burning California.

I also saw a video about "autobots", small, self-flying drones of artificial intelligence with facial recognition software.
Supposedly, they have been used to seek out persons of military interest where they detonate in their faces, killing them.
This death is directed, saying the information in the brain is also destroyed.
When the strange gets deranged you can only start wondering how your mind is being played.
Please, watch at the risk of your own sanity.

This video is part of todays' Canadian Broadcasting Corporations' news report about the immigrant border crisis.
11/29/2018, just over three minutes.

Last night I looked at replies to one American YouTube video about this,
and for the first time reported replies for hate and violent speech.
Most of them had very bad spelling and grammar, hard to see them as legit.

For sure, most Americans don't know that these South American countries were taken over by Americans,
and the people who are leaving that country behind are fleeing American oppression and induced poverty.
This inspired a couple of lines from me that I'd use as a reply to the most negative postings.

Does this mean that you should only let in people named Nina, Santa Maria and Pinto?
When you wave your flag in their face long enough they're going to want to wave it back.

This kind of border crisis is the result of the all the unregistered and non-citizen labour around the world.
It's only going to get worse everywhere.
The Canadian Professor Marshall McCluhan predicted this in the sixties as the result of global online use.
He invented the term "global village" and talked about how technology and it's use, and being an end user yourself,
will over-ride the truth of our lives and media news as an addictive process.
I was offered political asylum if I crossed the Queenston-Lewiston Bridge, it's not any different for me.
Why type that my heart goes out to these people, when I don't have enough heart for my own life.

I don't want to be very specific about a video, because if it's timely now it might not be, even in a few days.
But this talk show "comedy sketch" about President Donald Trump is one of the better ones, new today, 11/30/2018.
One of President Trumps' advisors has confessed to lying to Congress about President Trumps business dealings.
His Russian contacts are coming under increasing investigation.
This video features a lot of President Trump being interviewed outside the White House.

What I would like to point out is the Russian Premier Vladamir Putin reference.
That's a major theme in American news, saying the heads of other countries are assassinating reporters.
This video is over seven minutes long.
If you go into a bar and order a white Russian, what do you get? A photo of Donald Trump.

Major wildfires continue to burn in California as more evidence comes to light.
This video is very convincing about housing and businesses burning when the forests aren't.
A news station helicopter provides video of massive, unexplained clouds and these fires.

American news about President Donald Trump is happening fast and furious.
Obviously, Democrat Party control of the House of Representatives, which happens officially in January,
is already causing a huge shift in the power of the White House and its' employees.
This two minute video sums up todays' action and shows the most recent developments.
This isn't good. When dictators are feeling the public rising up against them,
and President Trump is having his worst lowest approval numbers, according to polls,
they usually attack a country to get the public behind them, always a big American thing.
President Trump has been saying that America doesn't know how to fight a war any more,
saying Vietnam to Afghanistan were wars that America lost.
His idea of a war isn't American soldiers entering other countries to fight specific groups,
but fighting an entire country to own it.

Last edited by John Watt; Dec-01-2018 at 04:51.
Reason: forgot to embed the video

Farmland. You would think a description of rural life would be ripe and refreshing,
just like the food that's grown there, thinking outdoor air and farm living.
America. Here's a brief description that defies what the land and life used to be.

California’s San Joaquin Valley, from Stockton in the north to Arvin in the south, is 234 miles long and 130 miles wide.
If you drive there from the Bay Area, in less than an hour the temperature will go from 57 to 97 degrees. It will keep rising.
The radio stations are predominantly Spanish: ranchera music, boleros, corridos, ballads of spurned love,
and the distinctive norteño sound—percussive, driving, no brass.
On the English-language station an indignant voice advises listeners to be mentally vigilant against “sitcoms, news reports,”
the entire panoply of “mainstream media because it’s all the same skank, it’s all from one cesspool, their snakish agenda for a one-world order.”
The country music summer hit is called “Take a Drunk Girl Home.”

The Valley is flat, under a constant cloud of dust, smog, pesticides, and smoke. The smog is from Bay Area traffic carried in by the wind,
the pesticides from the millions of pounds of chemicals poured onto the land every year,
the smoke from the wildfires that burn to the north and get trapped in the Valley, pushed to the ground by the heat.
The cloud is kept there by the Sierra Nevada to the east, the Coast Ranges to the west, and the Tehachapi Mountains to the south,
which the Fresno-based writer Mark Arax calls “our Mason-Dixon Line,”
because it marks the Valley’s physical and psychological separation from the cosmopolitan culture of Southern California and Los Angeles.
The city of Bakersfield and the area around it, on the southern edge of the Valley, has the worst air quality in the United States.

Measured by yearly production, the San Joaquin Valley is one of the highest-value stretches of farmland in the country,
and is dominated by large growers who preside over a labor force of migrant workers in a way that has not changed much
since Carey McWilliams described it in his 1939 book, Factories in the Fields. Arax likens it to a Central American country.
“It’s the poorest part of California,” he told me. “There’s almost no middle class.
To find its equivalent in the United States you’d have to go to Appalachia or the borderlands of Texas.”

Raisins, table grapes, pistachios, almonds, tomatoes, stone fruits, garlic, and cabbage are some of the crops of the Valley.
The clementines that we buy in netted bags at the supermarket are grown here,
as are the pomegranates that make the juice we are told protects us from cancer.
The revenue from all the crops harvested here and elsewhere in California is $47 billion a year, more than double that of Iowa,
the next-biggest agricultural state. Most of this revenue benefits a few hundred families,
some with as many as 20,000 or even 40,000 acres of land.
Plantations on the west side of the Valley are so huge that managers keep track of workers by airplane.

John Watt here: Further on, this article describes the soil as "being a crumble", dry and chunky,
after being soaked with pesticides and artificial nutrients for generations, now unable to grow without chemicals.

This is one of the most incredible online news articles I have seen in our online age.
It describes a new form of fire tornado in California and uses many high tech features.
I recommend looking for volumes and mutes so you access the voices and soundtracks.
There are many mini-videos and moving graphics to describe the storms' path.
Some of the functions and animated displays are unknown to me.
I'm not sure how long this will remain active online as this newspaper publishes,
dated now, 12/8/2018. This is the Carr wildfire, not the one that burned Paradise City.

This is another link to an online news article, or scientific documentary, or both.
It describes the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica and how, for the first time, it is creating global anxiety.
Large than Florida, it is unique in shape and depth and how it is starting to break up in a new way.
It could cause a fifteen foot rise in ocean water levels that would create a global catastrophe.
Scientists are saying it would take the most massive engineering effort ever taken by humans on earth,
to build an underwater ridge of stone that would try to prevent the leading edge from entering the ocean.
If this is enough to give you a mild brain-freeze, you might not want to read all the scientific datadaytodaydatamora.

I'm in the Niagara Peninsula,
and for the first time in a long time there's lots of snow staying on the ground with freezing temperatures.
So I know snow and ice, giving me icy thoughts when icicles point at my brain.
If you want to add support to the fifty million dollar funding the American and British governments are committing for study,
please, send me $20 and I'll mail you a piece of ice from the Thwaites Glacier.
If all you get is a soggy envelope, hey, you can only blame a slow postal service,
or your own failure to see the maps that show you are living where rising waters will fill your mailbox for free.
If all you do is click to see the photo that shows first, it's worth it.

Anything to do with money is always big news in the disUnited States,
and I'm always reading it about, because it's there, and because I look for it.
That goes beyond seeing what Republican and Democrat media are putting out,
wanting to see the statistics and the directions of financial flow, a global thing.

This article about dangerous financial predicaments that could cause the next great depression,
in the United States, could be seen as an ordinary theme for ordinary news days.
What makes this different for me is seeing it is The New York Times.
This newspaper sets a standard for reporting that is the basis for American financial decisions.
No doubt the stock market took a dip after this came out, and stock brokers dipped into it.

If you're not interested in reading the five probable causes for the next crash,
what I found humorous was in the section where England leaving the European Union is called Brexit.
Italy, with the slang of Italexit, was also termed Quitaly.
That got me thinking. Poland, never getting respect it deserves, could be Polaxed.
Finland, with a very ambitious population, could Fixit.
I'm still seeing an elderly man standing in the snow, staring off into the tree-lined distance,
in and out of focus, for a very long time, as my image of Sweden...
Mexico, with that caravan of immigrants trying to enter the U.S., could be Mexexit.
Texas, a state unto itself with a history of presidents who run the country from there,
having very a low count of time spent in the White House, could be Textext.
New Zealand , the home of JHC, could become Zealext the Cat. oh...

This new global attitude about quitting and losing has become digestive.
Scientists say a North American processed food diet is creating a loss of "gut bacteria".
The average human should have two to three pounds, but the new average is far less.
Testing with different foods created a surprise because one food changed psychology.
Eating yogourt made people calm and they reacted to tests with less stress.
This makes me want to update that old saying, if not a Shakespearean quote.
"There's something rotten in the state of Denmark, and I want to eat it."

They say in America that whatever America does, Russia follows, becoming Russianext.
The Pacific Ocean, a very laid back realm, becomes Pacifext.
The Atlantic Ocean, stirred up because satellites have created underwater cable neglect,
wants to be Atlantext.
The living stones of Quacksayamodal have demonstrated a time travel ability,
disappearing into another dimension, now called Megalexit.
Spanish flamenco dancers who are leaving tradition, wearing modern work-out attire, are Spandexit.
Greece could have become Grexit, but they're still arguing in the agora.
Americans conquered South Vietnam, and many veterans are still waiting for North Vietnext.

The New York Times is saying any one of these financial scenarios can cause a crash next year.

Two posts ago I mentioned a scientific study about human digestive bacteria and yogourt.
Two more articles about bacteria have come to my attention.

A Canadian woman, a bacteria researcher, was hiking in Nova Scotia when she took a dirt sample.
When she looked at it there was a form of bacterial life that she had never seen before,
and as her research took her further into the scientific community, no-body had seen it before.
It is now being said to be a form of life that wasn't known to exist, in a very important way.
They are now saying it represents a new branch on the tree of life, saying look at it this way.
If you take the evolution of human beings all the way back to when we were just bacterial life,
this newly discovered bacteria represents another form of life, an unrecognized branch on "the tree of life".
Oh! Now I remember. They called it a "new kingdom of life". I better go and find a link for you.
The photos are incredible.

Another article about bacteria detailed the discovery of a new area of bacterial life.
Scientists now realized that under the crust of our earth exists a layer of bacteria.
Some of these bacteria self-repair and scientists aren't sure how long they have been living.
They haven't drilled research holes into every part of our earth, so they can't say for sure,
but they are theorizing that this dense and deep bacterial layer exists all around the world.
It is being said this could be the oldest living thing on earth, and is composed of undiscovered forms of life.
This makes me think about what I say about oil.
Those Texas oil men started calling oil a fossil fuel, saying it's the decomposed organic matter of the dinosaur era.
One reason was seeing minute pieces of fossil rock in their Texas oil, and seeing dinosaur bones at La Brea tar pits.
Hot oil that is leeching its way through fossil rock as it rises to the surface will absorb dissolved fossil rock.
The La Brea tar pits are just that, oil that rose to the surface and stayed there, thickening, becoming a trap for surface life.
If oil reservoirs are said to be the result of organic matter, when they are depleted they are empty.
Now, it is being observed that drained oil reservoirs are starting to fill up again. That's not supposed to happen.

What is oil is the decomposed, even fermented, remains of this giant layer of bacterial life,
rising as it heats to the surface, what really is the grease of the earth, what lets continents slide?
I always wondered why Vaseline Petroleum jelly is supposed to be a pure product to use on human skin.
Skin specialists all say that if you cover your body in petroleum jelly for all of your life,
would it dry out your skin a little or over-moisturized it a little, almost like bee honey for it's medicinal uses.
That doesn't sound like an oil product that causes explosions in gasoline engines.
If nothing else, that illustrates how powerful and dense oil is, having organic qualities that are medical for humans,
and having a form of energy that can be distilled as diesel fuel and gasoline.
It is an essence of our planet, and this reality, and what it truly is, should be promoted as public education.

If there's one thing I would worry about, seeing all this unconstrained scientific exploring,
it's thinking if this under-crust bacteria is so ancient, if it contains life forms that never made it to the surface,
what could their release do to life on earth? If nothing else, it would start to cause immediate mutations in all life.

I just got into a lot of back-trackia looking for this bacteria, for over ten minutes, but I couldn't find it.
People, even detectives, talk about acting on a "gut feeling", more than having "heart" or "soul".
What if the bacteria in our bodies is the oldest part of our evolution as human beings,
and is the essence of who were are, our bones and organs being upgrades as becoming mobile on the surface?
Oh no! I can imagine a new movie, or recording, "Back to Bac".... "The Germinator"...